“Mass Shooting”

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — Law enforcement authorities had enough officers on the scene of the Uvalde school massacre to have stopped the gunman three minutes after he entered the building, and they never checked a classroom door to see if it was locked, the Texas public safety chief testified Tuesday, pronouncing the police response an “abject failure.”

Police officers with rifles instead stood and waited in a hallway for over an hour before they finally stormed the classroom and killed the gunman, putting an end to the May 24 attack that left 19 children and two teachers dead.

The classroom door, it turned out, could not be locked from the inside, yet there is no indication officers tried to open it while the gunman was holed up, Col. Steve McCraw, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, said in blistering testimony at a state Senate hearing. Instead, he said, police waited around for a key.

Uvalde shooting: Photos show armed police waiting in school hallway

The first images showing armed police waiting in a corridor during last month’s school shooting in Uvalde, Texas have emerged.

Police arrived earlier in the attack and with more firepower than previously reported, according to US media who have seen investigative documents.

The images show police holding rifles and riot shields.

Report: Police in Uvalde had rifles earlier than known

UVALDE, Texas (AP) — Multiple police officers armed with rifles and at least one ballistic shield stood and waited in a school hallway for nearly an hour while a gunman carried out a massacre of 19 elementary students and two teachers, according to a Monday news report that marks the latest embarrassing revelation about the failure of law enforcement to thwart the attack.

Two Uvalde city police officers passed up a fleeting chance to shoot a gunman outside Robb elementary school before he went on to kill 21 people inside the school, a senior sheriff’s deputy told the New York Times.

That would mean a second missed opportunity for officers to stop Salvador Ramos before the 24 May attack inside the school that killed 19 children and two teachers. Officials said that a school district police drove past Ramos without seeing him in the school parking lot.

The unidentified officers, one of whom was armed with an AR-15-style rifle, said they feared hitting children playing in the line of fire outside the school, Chief Deputy Ricardo Rios of nearby Zavalla county told the newspaper.

Handwritten notes Texas Gov. Greg Abbott used after the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde reportedly shed new light on his erroneous comments about the police response — and raise questions about who allegedly “misled” him about the officers’ performance.

Abbott, who initially praised police for their “quick response” to the massacre, later said he was “livid” after being “misled” into saying responding officers had “engaged with the gunman” outside the school before he entered the building.

A Maryland factory worker accused of killing three coworkers and injuring two other people in a Thursday shooting was charged with dozens of felonies, including murder, authorities said Friday.

Joe Louis Esquivel, 23, of Hedgesville, WV, was hit with a slew of murder, attempted murder, assault and weapons charges in connection with the Smithsburg massacre, according to the Washington County Sheriff’s Office.

He was behind bars with no bond Friday night, officials said.

A number of people were killed during a “mass shooting” at a factory in Maryland on Thursday, reports said.

There were “multiple fatalities” in the shooting that took place around 2:30 p.m. at Columbia Machine in Smithsburg, according to the Washington County Sheriff’s Office.

The suspect was also shot at the scene by police.

Reports indicate 3 dead with the shooter wounded and in custody.

Twitter Maryland

The initial reaction to the mass murder of children in Uvalde, Texas was horror and bewilderment. Not again. How could this happen? Perhaps you, like me, imagined that the killer shot his way into the school and wrought havoc fast, before police could respond. We were wrong. Law enforcement knew he was on his way, armed and dangerous. The door was unlocked. A good-sized contingent of police failed to act for an hour. Finally, members of an elite Border Patrol unit engaged the murderer, taking fire, and prevailed.

A society is rotten, certifiably mad, when the cries of little kids and women being blown to smithereens do not make grown men drop their poisonous progressive protocol and run to the rescue.

Last week we learned that a lady from Charleston had the male bits and the moral compass that upwards of 19 police officers, hunkered down at the Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas—all SWATTED-up and swaddled in Kevlar body armor—were without.

At the same time, the trapped children cried out to 911 as they were being mowed down. These babies screamed for grown men to quit cowering and pondering bureaucratic distinctions—active shooter or barricaded shooter—a distinction without a difference if the barricaded shooter is also holding the kids hostage and picking them off one by one.

Do not rest in peace, Uvalde Angels. Rage from the heavens.

Modern school shootings are an exceptionally abhorrent phenomenon that we got along just fine without for the first couple of centuries of U.S. history.

So, it’s wholly reasonable to want them gone. It’s not like America was suffering from any lack of the beneficial side effects of school shootings before the man with the brain tumor climbed the U. of Texas clock tower in 1966 and the “I Don’t Like Mondays” girl opened fire at the San Diego elementary school in 1979.

School shootings and other heavily publicized mass killings are an intensely grotesque problem, often engineered by obsessive notoriety-seekers specifically to elicit maximum outrage from you and me. (For example, Bob Geldof of the Boomtown Rats says cornerstone K–12 shooter Brenda Spencer wrote to him to say “she was glad she’d done it because I’d made her famous….”)

DALLAS — In the days since an 18-year-old gunman barricaded himself inside an elementary school classroom in Uvalde and fatally shot 19 students and two teachers, the police’s narrative of the events leading up to and during the massacre has shifted by the day.

As more shocking details are revealed about police action — and inaction — during the slaying, the Uvalde community has been desperate for answers.

Journalists and lawmakers have called for the release of 911 calls, body-camera footage and other evidence to determine what happened May 24, but Texas open-records laws may prevent the public from ever seeing important evidence.

After the mass shooting at a Texas elementary school, schools around the country pledged to boost security measures and increased the presence of law enforcement on campus — partly to reassure parents and students.

But police inside schools can make some students more uneasy, not less. Especially for Black students and other students of color, their personal experiences with policing can leave them feeling unsafe and alienated from school when they see officers on campus.

Cops get in the way of the mayhem – Teachers, parents want real discipline as NYC student suspensions fall

At least two states are pressing forward with legislation that would allow trained school teachers to carry firearms on public school grounds in the wake of the Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde, Texas.

While arming teachers has faced widespread hostility from gun control organizations and national teachers unions such as the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association, allowing teachers to carry firearms in schools was among the recommendations made by several school safety commissions formed in the aftermath of school shootings in 2018.

Three dead and 11 injured in Philadelphia mass shooting

A shooting in Philadelphia left at least three people dead and 11 others injured, local authorities said.

Police officers saw multiple gunmen shooting into a crowd after hearing multiple gunshots just before midnight on Saturday evening. At least three of the victims, two men and a woman, died from their injuries as of Sunday morning, according to NBC Philadelphia.

A Texas inmate who escaped custody three weeks ago is suspected of slaughtering a 66-year-old man and four of his grandsons hours before cops shot the fugitive dead on Thursday.

Gonzalo Lopez, 46, died in a shootout with cops on Thursday in Jourdantown, Texas outside of San Antonio while he was driving a pickup owned by the granddad.

Grandfather Mark Collins and his grandchildren were found dead in a cabin in rural Centerville, 100 miles outside of Houston and more than 200 miles from where Lopez met his end, reports said.